4.3.2 Banality of evil

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz.
In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history.
There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

BB

The presentations raise vital questions , dis-aggregates historical experience and has generated interest in me to study the issues further . Many thanks to the Professors.

JB

Mar 05, 2017

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Took this course for job purposes. It is great for everyone, although I believe that people with some background in comparative literature will benefit from it the most,

从本节课中

Beginnings of war

In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the conditions that were necessary for the Holocaust to occur, the early events of World War II, Thomas Kenneally’s Schindlers List, Andres Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, and questions of guilt and responsibility.

教学方

Murray Baumgarten

Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature

Peter Kenez

Professor Emeritus

脚本

By the way, the Banality of Evil comes out for Hannah Arrendt right away at the Eichmann trial. When Eichmann is in prison in Israel, He was kidnapped from this little German enclave, where a bunch of Nazis were living in Argentina, in a totally German world. There were several of those in Latin America. And then, of course, many former Nazis came to or were brought to this country to participate among other things in the Cold War effort. But Eichmann is in jail, and he asks the Israeli captain who's been watching him, do you have anything to read? Something recent, right? Literature. So the Israeli captain gives him a copy of Lolita in German. You don't know about Lolita. Maybe you do. Anybody seen the movie? Read the book? So you know, it's Novikov's wonderful novel about American culture, an American teenage girl who seduces, but anyway. Eichmann gave it right back to his prison guard. He says, this is unwholesome! So again we have to ask what kind of a person is this? What kind of character. So on that note, what kind of character? So, I'm gonna give you just a couple of passages from, or mention them, from Last of the Just. There's this amazing moment in The Last of the Just. And this is an effort to write. The whole story of the Holocaust, right? The whole theme, which is again a question of language and of words, and who you're talking to, and how you're bearing witness. This is the end of section five. Ernie was already slipping down the wall, his hands high, his head raised as if he wanted to bind himself for one moment to a vision of Heaven. Or as if he were refusing to see the Earth rushing toward him more than he melted toward it. The Earth flying up toward oh high diver, oh dying swan, his skinny arms spread wide like wings. Ernie had already taken flight, when his feet caught on the window sill, holding him back for an instant, by a ridiculous reflex, as if all his will to live had taken refuge in that part of his body. Though uselessly, or as if an eth is ties by suffering and absolute self abnegation, the fear of death had awaken suddenly in his heart of hearts, pulling him back toward life. When it was already too late, I mean, to put this suicide here in the novel, is to be historically accurate. And Peter has mentioned this, many people could not bear the thought of being uprooted, torn out of their world Committed suicide. This is a novel where half way through the novel, what is Schwartzbard doing? The next chapter begins, Statistics show that the percentage of suicide among the German Jews was practically nill during the years before the end. In the prisons, and the ghettos, and all the caves of darkness where the beast's muzzle sniffed up from the abyss. Even at the doors to the crematorium, anus of the world, that was in your Lunzmut passage, in the words of a learned Nazi eye witness. Back in 1934 hundreds and hundreds of little German school boys came up for their examinations in suicide and hundreds of them passed. This is the moment, right? How do you build your character. Well, they decided to end their character in suicide. But, Schwartzbard sees that this is something he's chronicling about end of a world. So, the first death of Ernie Levy takes its place among the statistics besides hundreds of similar, though more irrevocable, deaths. It is admirable that during a period that they were teaching murder to their Aryan scholars, the instructors taught the Jewish children suicide. This point illuminates German technique. Its extreme rigor and simplicity from which no departures are tolerated, even in pedagogy. The narrator is doing something. Remarkable here. But he's both giving us Ernie's experience and he's also giving us the experience from someone who knows what the whole trajectory is. So he says, okay so now we're gonna go back to Ernie. And Ernie has now, a second life. And the second life that Ernie goes through, involves, well, I'll give you just a couple more passages. You don't have to read this book, but as the book that gave us, A language, and gave us the effort to understand. Ernie, falls in love with Golda, even under these terrible circumstances. People were attracted to each other. Golder was born with a limp. When the passports of immigrating Polish jews were revoked in '38 and the new Austrian government sent them back to the Polish border, the Englebaum family was swept up in the general expulsion. This is historical narrative, and this literary work is full of historical narrative. A kind of armature on which we can then try to understand character. The story was well covered in the international press. On the first night, the Jews were deported to Czechoslovakia. The next day the Czechs sent them to Hungary. From there they were shipped to Germany, and then to Czechoslovakia again. They traveled in endless circles. Finally, they retreated to fishing boats on the Danube. Most of them drowned themselves in the Black Sea. Wherever they landed, they were expelled. So this is also part of that story of attritional extermination. In the violent Eddy of the den Eugalda was flung overboard. At the last moment her leg was crushed between the hull and a rock. They set the leg in wooden splints. She sang to drown her pain. After complicated wanderings, a few of the castaways found a footing on Italian soil, where they finally dispersed. One group entered France illegally, with Golder riding on a man's back, the wounded leg ceased growing. That was all. Well, Golda and Ernie then are going to meet and fall in love. And then Ernie has a problem, because Golda is already in the lager. And Ernie goes into hiding and he lives, the whole section is called, living like a dog. Cuz how do you hide if the Nazis are looking for you and the local Population is getting rewards for turning you in? What can you do? And at some point Ernie and Golda who have met Decide to get married. But she's now in the Lager. So he decides that rather than continue to live like a dog he will try to join her in the Lager. But how do you get in? Oops. How do you get into the logger if you've been outside? So he knows something, he knows Golda has told him that the Jews are condemned. And Ernie tries to get in. And he gets What is called a correction? And they beat him up. And he gets put in. What harm was there in a Jew wanting to get into the camp, he cried finally. And so then we have here a whole set of questions of the Nazis who are beating him up. Let the creature, said the little man, let the creature explain the reasons for his requests. Does the creature have friends in the camp? What messages to transmit? To what organization does the creature belong? Hans, explain to the creature that all of this is just and hors d'oeuvre to be followed by the main course of punishment. Now does the creature understand? Now and so on and on, as if in an inverted delirium, believing his victim and not himself, possessed by a devil. It goes on and Ernie then gets married in the camp to Golda, And then, of course, is killed with her. How do you deal with this? What's the langauge that you can use? And so some of you who have read it might remember the end. And here is the narrator trying to deal with the end. And he remembers a story in Jewish tradition About the Roman execution of ten famous Rabbis. I see the the parchment burning but the letters are taking wing, the letters of the Torah, yes, the letters are taking wing. So there's a communal moment. Ernie repeated as the flame blazing in his chest rose suddenly to his head. With dying heart she embraced Golder's body in already unconscious gesture of loving protection. And they were found that way half an hour later by the [FOREIGN] commander responsible for burning the Jews in the crematory ovens. Well Schwartzbard wants to tell us the whole story. And so it was for millions who turned from luftmenschen into luft. People who could live on air, and now they were turned into smoke. I shall not translate. So this story will not finish with some tomb to be visited in memoriam. There are no tombs. For the smoke that rises from crematorium obeys physical laws like any other. The particles come together, disperse according to the wind that propels them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then. And then We get the following, a prayer, a poem, and praise Auschwitz B Mightaning the Lord. And praise Cherblanka, Bukeenbal, B. Moutouzen, The Lord Belzig, and praise Sobie Borg, B Helgno the Lord [FOREIGN] It's a prayer. It echoes many religious prayers. How do you have a, what language? And this says, you can see is a broken language. But it's not enough, what's left? And this is afterall a novel written afterwards. Yes, at times one's heart could break in sorrow. But often, too preferably in the evening, I can't help thinking that Ernie Levy, dead six million times, is still alive somewhere. I don't know where. Yesterday, as I sit in the street trembling in despair, rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above upon my face. But there was no breeze in the air, no cloud in the sky, there was only a presence, right. There's no monument, there's no memorial, there's only a presence. So this is what we're left with in the last of the just. So, this is a [FOREIGN] option, a [FOREIGN] problem. As I said but it's also a reader question about language. And this is as I say, the first book. That wants to give us the whole trajectory. And Ernie of course then becomes a representative figure. And like good realist novels which have representative figures, he has all of the experiences. And we have to ask, who is saying that poem, that prayer?